


Shaky Hands

by Merixcil



Series: Whumptober 2019 [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dead animals, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:01:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25384234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Newt tries to make the most of the Kaiju carcass rescued from Tokyo earlier that week
Series: Whumptober 2019 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1838356





	Shaky Hands

This is why test tubes are a waste of time. Too small, too easy to misplace, too fucking fragile. And the worst part is that when they inevitably break you have to clean them up. Something as innocuous as heat can send them over the edge, and really, where’s the fun in that?

“Oi, Geiszler, clean up your shit.” Sharmin snaps. He’s a hardass, and one of the least flexible people Newt’s had the misfortune to work with since he started on the Kaiju detail. A biologist specialising in amphibian toxins, like this is Jurassic Park. You can’t make it up.

“On it.” Newt mumbles, reaching for the shattered remnants of his most recent experiment and pausing just before he cuts his hand open. Broken glass. Glass! Of all things! It’s all accidents waiting to happen.

Newt shuffles over to the janitor’s cupboard and scoops out the dustpan and brush from just inside the door. The plastic jitters in his hand, striking up a quick time rhythm that earns him a flash of annoyance from Medlov as he winds his way back between the islands in the lab to his station. Another week he’s supposed to be here, working with tiny samples and trying to isolate molecules that are determined to decay on him in record time. He doesn’t even know if he’s picking things up in the right order. For all he knows he’s already lost the most important chemicals and he’s busy wasting the good shit on the lab floor.

Down on one knee, the brush nudges the broken glass and it clicks and screeches against each other. Like metal bending back on itself, the sound of cars crushed underfoot. Newt was there, he saw it, he knows how this story plays out.

The dustpan won’t stay still for him, twitching and jumping in his hand. He makes it stay, just long enough to scoop the glass up into it, which he promptly drops again as soon as he stands up.

“Jesus, Geiszler.” Sharmin groans. “Get it together, man. What’s gotten into you?”

“I’m fine.” Newt insists. “Just give me a minute. I-”

There is a stain of blood on the ground, where the Kaiju lymph node he’s supposed to be running tests on has been punctured by the broken glass and ruined for good. Nice going, you threw it all away, genius.

The camera, falling from his hands. Teeth never look so sharp as they do up close, the maw of the beat opened wide and shrieking, screaming for more, for space, for matter. Tokyo, a jumbled mess of sirens and cracked concrete behind him. Arms too many and too long and a tail too wide and the awesome size of the thing more than he had been ready for. Clutching at his sleeve, covering the tattoo of it’s brother. He wanted this, he asked for this. He told himself that if the monster lived it wouldn’t have been so bad.

Just two days ago. And here he is in an Okinawan lab with a group of European scientists who don’t fully appreciate the danger they have all put themselves in.

The lymph node was pulled from beneath the creatures eye. At least, he thinks it’s a lymph node. He was supposed to check, but he supposes he’ll never know.

He’ll never know unless another Kaiju should choose to beach itself on his shores. His sleeves stay rolled down, covering the imprint of the first Category Two that ever emerged from the breach. People died, and he looked on in wonder. The real thing, as it transpires, is worse than the stories could ever fully explain.

“Leave it.” Sharmin pulls him back before Newt can have another go at cleaning up his mess.

All eyes on Newt’s shaking hands. But he’s not really here, he’s outside the last Japanese Shatterdome wondering how he could ever have got it so wrong.

“Take the rest of the day off.” Sharmin commands. Newt doesn’t even bother to formulate half an excuse for himself before he’s out the door, shedding his immaculately clean lab coat on the way.

He passes the containment unit, the vulcanised glass steamed up from the residual heat from the beast. Specially locked away, because Earth’s atmosphere is too acidic for the flesh to survive in the open. And it is just flesh, and blood, and bile. The same as all living things.

The head of a shark, the arms of a gorilla. Newt’s fingers jitter against the glass as a roar sounds in his head.

“I can do this.” He tells the dead Kaiju. “I can do this. I love this. You’re amazing.”

He never got the picture he wanted. His camera shattered as fast as he was able to let it go.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'whumptober' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >MFA101: <3 <3


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